National Apprenticeship Week – Meet Courtney

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I had never heard of Greencore before applying for a job with them. I had gone to university and bounced in and out jobs as I had no idea what I really wanted to do. The more and more I thought about a career, the more I realised that I wanted to go back into learning. I really couldn’t fund going to college or university again and I have always been one to enjoy working and getting hands on anyway so I began to look at Apprenticeships. That’s when I found the Trainee Manager Programme at Greencore.

I began to wonder if a job in food the right place for me, but Greencore is a large company with a fantastic reputation for caring and understanding people and the food industry is one that is always going strong so I decided to apply.

I chose to go into Operations because of the people side of things and I love a job that’s quite hands on. My expectations were very different to my experience but in the best way. It was quite daunting to be expected to be on a belt running it within a few weeks, but I was given a full induction in the Factory at Manton Wood, learning all the different roles and the importance of those roles, I was shown in detail what production meant and how the whole thing ran so smoothly, I was still aware of the expectations of me to be running a belt but with the help of some very good teachers within the factory, I was running a belt without even noticing my mentor was not around. I have never been in a job where I have been so supported and it’s been amazing, knowing that if I had a problem, I had so many people I could turn to for help.

On the academic learning side of things, you’re given a few months to get used to the company before you started university, which meant that I had a very basic understanding of management within production however I was still very new to the whole thing. When I started university, I found that the subjects I was learning about, I could pull direct experience from work which made it a lot easier to understand.

The idea of having to balance university work with a full-time job was again something that I was slightly worried about – it seemed as though it would be a bit of an impossible task to manage the two and still have a life outside of work, but that’s not been the case at all. At Manton Wood they have been so supportive and let me have one full day a week to study and are more than happy to answer any management or business questions that I may have, and they are always finding me new tasks to encourage my development but without pushing me too hard.